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Have you ever had a moment where you’ve thought, “I’ve found my people?” That was me, Friday night, at the Booker T. Cleveland Society for the Learned, which might be one of the world’s coolest book clubs. Meeting monthly in bars, the society’s rules are simple and basically boil down to, you must bring a book and swap that book before the night is out.

The group is pretty self-selecting. Mainly young professionals. Dorky enough to want to go to a book club. Outgoing enough to talk to strangers in bars. Snobby enough that they will judge your book, and you, by its cover, thank you very much. So, clearly, I fit right in. Continue reading →

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Last week’s On the Medina reported a new angle on ebook technology. Now, when you’re reading an ebook, it’s taking notes on you. “Ebooks that Read You” explained about technologies built into ereaders which record our reading habits.

Combining the data of individual readers, publishers now know how long it takes people to read specific books, which parts they get stuck on, and passages they highlight. Before, these things were all done in relative privacy. No one knew that I read To Kill a Mockingbird until the pages fell out. Or that I, admittedly, skipped the Moby Dick chapters about dolphin behavior. My marginalia was for me and me alone – or for the unfortunate soul who asked to borrow one of my books. Continue reading →

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Or, I Stole a Book

Photo credit to TheCreativePenn

Oh, the twisty world of the internet, where a few clicks can take you somewhere you never intended to go…

The other day, I learned that Deadlocked, the new Sookie Stackhouse novel, had recently been published. I love the books in that series, low brow and trashy as they are. Reading them is the equivalent of having wine and chicken fingers for dinner. Delicious, comforting, terrible for you, and not something that you’d generally like to advertize about yourself. They’re a Southern, sexed-up Buffy, with an even greater wink at the audience. Continue reading →

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Or, Books shouldn’t self-destruct.

Photo credit to Mike Baird.

The other night I was in a race: me vs. my iPad’s battery life. And I lost.

I’ve recently discovered reading on my iPad. Now that there’s an app that lets you check out library books pretty seamlessly, I’m hooked. I checked out (is it really checked out when nothing’s physically leaving the library?) a mystery novel on Monday night, and had since spent almost all of my free time reading it.

An iPad only comes with one charger. And they want about $30 for a second one. As I am cheap, I only have one – it lives on my desk at work. So there I am on my couch Thursday night, way after my bedtime but close to the end of a book – clearly it’s a legitimate excuse to stay up late.

Photo credit to RiverRatt3.

And it beeps and tells me that I’ve got 10% battery life remaining, and then only 5. And snap, the book’s a race. I can speed read, and with most mysteries I do. (If you don’t spend the time required to write well, I don’t spend the time required to read well – I’m looking at you, James Patterson.) But this book is different – it is beautiful and wonderfully overwritten, clearly written by an English major. It has sentence structure that I’ve never seen before and more m dashes than belong in any piece of writing.

Photo credit to theloushe.

It’s a book that deserves the time, but I don’t have it. (It’s like I’ve just gotten a note: this book will self-destruct in thirty seconds. So I’m flying through the book, picking out the subject, verb, and object of the sentence and leaving all the other words behind. But it’s too late – and I run out. Desperately searching for a charger that I know’s not there, the iPad dies and I’m left without resolution. Sure they’ve already caught their guy and know who done it, but it’s that final twist, that hallmark of all good mysteries, where the information revealed in the last few pages makes you think about the whole book in a new light. And I don’t get to read it. At least not that night.

Books are meant to be immutable. They’re not meant to self-destruct. There’s something about reading that’s completely liberating – you enter a new world, and only leave when you choose to. There’s a conscious act of leaving, that moment when you lift you head, look around, and slowly close the cover. But suddenly, I was unceremoniously thrown out of the world that I’d been in. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200; the book you’re reading, the world you’re in, no longer exists.

Photo credit to Gael Martin.

I’m learning to love reading on my iPad. It’s great the gym; it’s great to be able to carry a library in my purse. And you’d think that 10 hours of battery life would be great to. But, I can lose myself in a book for much more than ten hours. I can lose myself in a book for a weekend, or in a series for days on end. And yes, that lovely and beautifully-written mystery novel that I was reading: it’s the first in a series. So, here’s to many more battles with my battery life. Wish me luck.

Questions of the day: Do you have an eReader? Have you been thwarted by the battery life? Do I just need to suck it up and buy a second charger?

MaggieCakes is a blog about social media, marketing, culture, and what’s new on the internet written by me, Maggie O’Toole. Every day (that’s such a lie, maybe once or twice a week) I comb blogs and news outlets for the news about internet culture and social media to bring them to you (with my commentary, of course) here on MaggieCakes. Find anything interesting in the worlds of tech, culture, or social media that you’d like to see a post on? Leave a comment or send me an e-mail at 2maggieotoole@gmail.com.

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I’ve had a hard time getting excited about things recently, but was lucky enough to stumble across Findings and its gotten my head buzzing.

The newest advancement in digital, literary culture, Findings is a website/app/digital service/what have you that allows you to share your margin notes with others across the community of readers, opening up the potential for reading to be a more dynamic and engaging experience that ever before.

Even since reading Good Omens, I’ve been interested in the possibility of interactive marginalia. In the story, a family passes a book down through the generations, each scribbling his own notes in the margins, often having contentious discussion of particular passages that last for generations. (Yes, I recognize that that’s a very selective telling of Good Omens, but I thought it’d take too long to explain angels, demons, and the new four horsemen of the apocalypse.)

Although it’s always seemed like marginalia was a conversation, it never truly was, it was always uni-directional. The first person that reads a book writes something and the next is left to either ignore the comment or reply to it. (I guess the first person could then read it again and they could go back and forth ad nauseum, but books that are worth that level of attention are rare, indeed.) So, with marginalia, as it currently stands, there’s no true back and forth; there’s acting and reacting. But, Findings allows us to all have our own clean draft to respond to, and then the ability to selectively turn on (and off) others’ comments.

As a society, we talk about where were you at certain moments, at those historical moments that so define our collective psyche (9/11, the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall), that the divide our lives into before and afters. But, I’d argue that there are moments in books that can be those defining moments in our lives, too. Especially those pivotal moments in the the bildugnsromans that we read as teenagers. The stories of growing up that are part of every high school English curriculum. How did you feel when they murdered Piggy? Or when George killed Lenny? When you first read The Lottery and realized what exactly the “prize” was? Or when Boo saved Scout? (Personally, I was really confused on that one and had to read it over a few times before I could get passed my initial reaction: Why is she dressed as meat?) For readers, those are defining moments, but we analyze them after the fact, in a generalized way. Respond to the events of Chapter 5. What was the central theme of the novel? Was this novel romantic, realistic, or naturalistic? Discuss.

Photo credit to serikotik1970

I want to have conversations with people’s real honest reactions, not those that they prepare for a teacher after the fact. I want to get to know my friends (and thoughtful strangers) through their books and through their notes. I want to read their scribbling in the digital margins. I’ve written that I worry that the move from paper to digital paper will fundamentally change the way that we read, that sometime tactile and beautiful will be lost. I still fear for the loss or musty paper and old fashioned type faces, for judging a book by its weight as well as its cover, but maybe well gain something wonderful in the move to ebooks, too. Maybe books will become vehicles for true multi-directional communication. Just think of the possibilities for choose your own adventure books…

Questions of the day: What book moments stand out in your life? Do you write in your books? And why is Scout dressed as meat?

MaggieCakes is a blog about social media, marketing, culture, and what’s new on the internet written by me, Maggie O’Toole. Every day (okay, I try for every day) I comb blogs and news outlets for the news about internet culture and social media to bring them to you (with my commentary, of course) here on MaggieCakes. Find anything interesting in the worlds of culture or social media that you’d like to see a post on? Leave a comment or send me an e-mail at 2maggieotoole@gmail.com.

Or, Open Graph is sharing without the caring

In Mark Zuckerberg’s world, everything is a social experience. Listening to a song? Would it be better if a friend was listening to it, too? Reading an article? Would it be great if your friends could read the same one? (Also, wouldn’t it be great is Mark could make some money on that happening?)

Well, Mark’s world is quickly becoming out world. And in Mark’s world, the default is social. (Do you ever feel bad for his college roommate? Did he announce things like “Mark is cutting his toenails,” or “Mark is eating pizza”?) Continue reading →

Or, You can pry my free books from my cold dead fingers

Photo credit to ellen forsyth

So, today I’m on LinkedIn and I see this as a “top headline in online media”: Amazon Working on a Netflix for Books. You know, Amazon’s come up with this revolutionary idea: you can check books out and the return them and then get more books. It’s gonna be big. Um, hi, it’s called a library.

Except that actually, it’s a pretty sucky library. According to Mashable:

“The details about the project are scarce, but it appears that the library would primarily contain older works with restrictions on how many books a user can access each month.”

So, it’s a library with only old books that limits how many I can take out – oh, and it charges me for the privilege? Doesn’t really sound like a library that I would use, even if it were free. (Okay, I lied, I’d use it, but I’d complain about it – a lot, probably on this blog.) Continue reading →

Post History

The Best of Maggie (Not Margaret)

Here are two topics that I’ve been following coming together in a creepy, creepy way: social automation and social network profiles that remain after death. I’ve been thinking about social media automation for a while now as it’s been cropping up more and more in discussions of personal branding and social media marketing. Although automated […]

The era of the big box bookstore is coming to an end and I, for one, am saddened by this. Yes, I know they were big, bad corporate giants that came in and destroyed neighborhood bookstores and coffee shops, ending third places and stifling locally-owned businesses in many communities. All that’s true – and awful. […]

In honor of the release of HP 7.5 this weekend, I bring you an excerpt of my thesis, “The Branding of Harry Potter: How Fanfiction is Challenging Concepts of Owner and Author”. Before jumping in, here’s what you need to know: I love Harry Potter and I love fanfiction; not in the way that I […]

Today SocialTimes has an article about Twitter, hyper-text, and the evolution of storytelling (Are Twitter Storytellers the Heroes of a New Postmodernism?). It’s written by Amanda Cosco who is proving to be my social media soul mate – recently she’s written articles on foodies, citizen journalists, Lady Gaga, and super hot nerds. Ms. Cosco discusses […]

A few days ago, Chris Sullivan of MyNorthwest.com wrote an article called “The art of storytelling in a world of technology”. He asked if you can tell a story over Twitter and wondered if the limitations of the medium limited the message. He quoted professional storyteller Anne Rutherford as saying “Whatever their age, whatever their […]